Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, UK) is an artist and writer living and working in Los Angeles. His solo exhibitions include, Profit & Loss, Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Addendum at Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Foreign Correspondence (October 1, 2012–January 14, 2021) at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Standard Deviations at Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland; Industrial Portraits at MAST Foundation, Bologna; Abstract of A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench at Petzel, New York; Three Pictures at Rodolphe Janssen, Walead Beshty at Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; Aggregato at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, Italy; Equivalents at Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Open Source, at Petzel, New York; Transparencies, at Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo; Automat, at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Walid AlBeshti, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Marginalia, at Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Gastarbeiten at Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin; A Partial Disassembling of an Invention without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying around at Random All over the Workbench at the Barbican Centre, London; Performances Under Working Conditions at Petzel Gallery, New York; Selected Bodies of Work at Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Fair Use at the Power Station, Dallas; Travel Pictures at Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Securities and Exchanges at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; A Diagram of Forces at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden / Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; PROCESSCOLORFIELD at Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Diapositives at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Legibility on Color Backgrounds at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Production Stills at Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Pulleys, Cogwheels, Mirrors, and Windows at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; Popular Mechanics at Wallspace, New York; Passages at LAXART, Los Angeles; Hammer Project: Walead Beshty, “Embassy!: a dismal science waiting room” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The Phenomenology of Shopping and Dead Malls at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; among others.

His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; the Jewish Museum, New York; Wiels, Brussels; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Tate Britain, London; Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao, among others. Beshty has been included in the 2019 Aichi Triennale, the 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2012 Shanghai Biennial, the 2011 Montréal Biennial, the 2009 Tate Triennial, the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and the 2008 and 2006 California Biennials. Beshty’s work is held in permanent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Beshty has organized exhibitions including, Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018 at Luma Arles, France; Picture Industry at the Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Picture Industry, as part of Systematically Open? New Forms for Contemporary Image Production, at Luma Arles, France; A Machinery for Living, at Petzel Gallery, New York; On the Matter of Abstraction (figs. A & B): Parallel Exhibitions of Post-War Non-Figurative Art from the Collection, with Christopher Bedford, at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Sunless, at Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That), Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and The Gold Standard, with Bob Nickas, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY.

Beshty has contributed to numerous publications, including, Texte zur Kunst and Afterall Journal, and has written for Artforum, Aperture, Art Review, Parkett, Dot Dot Dot, October, and The Exhibitionist. His writing is included in Laura Owens (Rizzoli), Jay DeFeo (Mitchell-Innes & Nash), Chance and Ruins (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel/MIT), Words Without Pictures (LACMA/Aperture), Luisa Lambri: Interiors (Ivorypress), The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol (MOCA/SkiraRizzoli), and Sharon Lockhart/Noa Eshkol (Sternberg Press), among others.

Monographs on his work include Addenda to a Sequence of Appearances: Walead Beshty Studios Inc. at Dane Chantala Associates Ltd., 2009–2023 (Hurtwood Press, 2023); Walead Beshty: Work in Exhibition 2011–2020 (Koenig Books, 2020); Walead Beshty: Procedurals, Petzel 2014–2017 (DISTANZ, 2017); Walead Beshty: Industrial Portraits: Volume One, 2008–2012 (JRP|Ringier, 2017); Walead Beshty: Natural Histories (JRP|Ringier, 2011; second expanded edition, 2014); Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001–2010 (Damiani Editore, 2010); and Walead Beshty: Pulleys, Cogwheels, Mirrors, and Windows (University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2009). Beshty edited the anthology Ethics, in Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series (MIT Press, 2015), and Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1842–2017, (JRP|Ringier, 2018). His collected writings 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings (2003–2015) was published by JRP|Ringier in 2016.

He has held academic positions at the University of California, Los Angeles, CA; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, CA; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, where he was associate professor from 2007–2016. He is currently teaching in the graduate History + Theory program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles. Beshty’s work is represented by Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Petzel Gallery, New York; Thomas Dane Gallery, London/Naples; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, and Capitain Petzel, Berlin.